Posted tagged ‘tracking’

I have good news! My badass, sex fiend of a Sith Warrior finally proved herself to the Dark Council and earned her Darth title! (And because her timing is always impeccable, the second she returned to the ship, the companion she’d been hitting on the whole game decided at last to put out. She was getting a little worried there, after choking him then hooking up with another companion…but it all worked out. She had a great night. I’m happy for her. Really, I am.) What all that means is I can go back to living a normal life. Normal life which includes vacuuming popcorn off the carpet, washing away the orange stuff that oozes through my bathroom walls when I take showers and updating the blog.

It’s been a long time since I’ve sat to write and had to think “um, what should I write about?” The hesitation I have about writing pally posts these days is that I really don’t want to spend 6-8 hours writing something that will be totally outdated in a couple of months. Then I got an idea. Lately, I’ve been exchanging some emails with a fantastic leveling holy paladin (also resto shaman). We got onto the topic of raid frames and buff/debuff tracking and she raised a lot of excellent points. Plus, raid frames is a fairly timeless topic. And thus, you’re now reading (or quickly scrolling through) a post about my sexy (IMO) raid frames.

Raid Frames

Raid frames are a totally personal thing and I don’t push any addon in particular. I say go with what your friends are using. It’s easier to get help that way. Buff/debuff tracking is also a personal thing and I’m not here to force my frames layout down anyone’s throat. But if you’re looking for ideas, then this post is for you.

I use Grid (or more specifically, Grid 2), but I have played around with the other addons (Vuhdo and Healbot) and I recall being able to configure them similarly.

In a 25 raid, my frames look kinda like the shot I posted above. It dates back to ICC, in Wrath (and most of these characters don’t exist anymore/have changed names, so don’t even TRY to stalk my ex-guildies!), but my (timeless!) frames still have the same features:

1)My spells vs Others’ spells: The feature’s been around in Grid for as long as I can remember, but I only started using it recently. I love it! It really comes in handy when you have other holy paladins in the raid. I was having troubles with my Beacon falling off due to being buried under other Beacon indicators. But no more! I also use the split for Holy Radiance. And I only track my own Judgement of the Pure since I’m not a raid leader and really don’t care if other pallies have their Judgement of Pure up.

2)Priorities: I think this may be a newer feature, but it’s lovely if you limit the number of indicator locations on your frames. When I listed my indicators above, I went in order of priority. So if someone had Forbearance and Low Mana, I would see the Forbearance square, not the Low Mana one. The places in my settings where priority is a concern are Center Text, Center Icons and Bottom Right.

3)Buffs/Debuffs in the middle: I find that I don’t act quickly on special statuses if they’re not obvious. I experimented with a few locations and eventually settled with big, obnoxious icons in the middle. In a raid environment, you rarely have to deal with more than 1 or 2 debuffs or statuses per fight, so it works perfectly. However, this setup is probably not ideal in pvp or even 5 man dungeons.

And there you have it

That’s how I big brother the raid. I’m often looking for new ideas and layouts, myself, but at the same time, it’s also good to limit what you track to what’s really useful. Too much noise in your frames will draw your attention away from the important elements.

And, if you were wondering, yes, I genuinely screwed up that image because I don’t know my left from my right. Don’t laugh.